Main menu

Life is Life

Tag Archives: Jamaica Kincaid

At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid: This was easily one of the weirdest books I’ve read in the past few years and all the better for it. I first encountered Kincaid’s work through the long essay “A Small Place” and there are certainly parallels to that book and the autobiographical fiction in this collection: themes of poverty, family relations, and the legacy of colonialism. Kincaid is known as a protest writer but the short stories collected here are much more ambiguous in their intent. The prose is intensely varied from one story to the next, taking radical shifts in register and perspective within the space of a few pages. Boundaries between fantasy and reality, between inner and outer life, are not so much transgressed as they are ground to bits and used as mulch for Kincaid’s imagination.

Free Will by Sam Harris: On a recent podcast, the controversial neuroscientist and moral philosopher said that disbelief in free will was his most strongly held conviction. He would more easily believe in the Abrahamic God of Creation, for instance, than in an autonomous “I” that is the author of each person’s actions. His case is compelling. While the position itself can be traced back to antiquity, Harris brings to bear modern evidence. Experiments using brain scans indicate relevant portions of our nervous system activate well before we consciously decide something. Of course, absence of free will has massive implications for contemporary society. Many of our institutions, including the US legal system, are predicated on its existence. Harris doesn’t supply many concrete alternatives. He does counsel for more compassion towards other conscious beings. This is wholly consistent with his model of human behavior, in which even the worst person can’t help but be themselves. But it also has the mixed blessing of being generally good advice. If we are really to parse out the implications of what a world without free will should look like, more guidance is needed than what this slim volume provides.

The Summer Book by Tove Jannson: Reading this was a treat. Jannson’s prose is direct, unpretentious but nonetheless incredibly evocative. This short novel relates discrete episodes in the life of Sophie, a young girl who has recently lost her mother. Somewhat reluctantly, she comes to live on an island in the Gulf of Finland under the care of her paternal grandmother. Their relationship, its joys and difficulties, is depicted with a sweetness that never becomes cloying. The island, the changes it undergoes with the seasons, parallels Sophie’s coming to terms with the beautiful and sometimes frightening world around her.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft: One of horror-master’s longest and, I think, best works, this novella follows the title character as he descends into inhuman madness. The trouble begins when Ward discovers that an ancestor had been conducting occult research in colonial Providence, Rhode Island. The young scholar resumes those researches—with predictably ghoulish results. But Lovecraft is more convincing here than practically anywhere else in his body of work. The setting of Providence and its environs, the author’s home town, is brilliantly realized. Lovecraft’s characteristic bigotry and overheated prose style are both present in abundance. But so is an obvious expertise in early American history. Whatever his limitations, stylistic or ethical, Lovecraft could be a disciplined writer when it came to background research.

To Walk the Night by William Sloane: This, along with another novel, The Edge of Running Water, form the author’s complete published works, gathered together by NYRB Classics under the title The Rim of Morning. A well respected writing instructor and editor, Sloan’s posthumous memory survived in the form of the ultimate SF writer’s-writer, as Stephen King explains in his introduction. His fans and publishers needn’t make such a hard sell. Slone’s prose is descriptive yet understated. His characters, particularly the female ones, are vivid to a degree that is sadly atypical in genre writers of the early 20th century. The difference between Sloan and Lovecraft is striking and instructive. The first novel in the collection, To Walk the Night, follows the narrator Bark Jones as he and his friend Jerry Lister investigate the mysterious death of an astronomy professor at their alma mater. The professor, whose body is completely consumed by fire, had been doing research in how to extend consciousness through space and time. The single person who can provide answers is the professor’s mysterious wife, who had wandered into town only days before the death. SF aficionados will probably recognize the tropes and plot twists that drive Sloan’s novel. They’ve been repeated and remixed a thousand times in novels, radio serials, movies, and television shows. It’s the sensitivity to character and place that makes this work special.